Edward Downes

Edward Thomas Downes gained acclaim as a prominent British conductor, separate from the American music critic and Metropolitan Opera commentator Edward Olin Davenport Downes born in 1911. As a youngster he took up the violin and piano while singing in a choir. He attended the University of Birmington from 1941 to 1944 and the Royal College of Music from 1944 to 1946, concentrating on the horn together with theory and composition. A lecturing post at Aberdeen University followed. The 1948 Carnegie Scholarship allowed him to work with conductor Herman Scherchen. His earliest conducting appointment came in 1950 with the Carl Rosa Opera Company. He joined Covent Garden in 1952. Wide notice arrived in April 1954 with his account of Der Freischütz; later that year he stepped in without rehearsal for a new production of Les contes d'Hoffmann. In 1963 he was chosen to direct the first Western performances in nearly thirty years of Shostakovich's once-banned opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, presented in its revised edition as Katerina Ismailova, for which he also supplied the English translation. He later prepared performing translations of further Russian operas, including Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Prokofiev's War and Peace. In 1966 he became assistant to music director Georg Solti at Covent Garden. The next year he led a complete Ring cycle by Wagner, the first by a British conductor since Beecham. He formally left his staff position at the end of the 1968-1969 season yet returned regularly, conducting the premieres of Richard Rodney Bennett's Victory in 1970 and Peter Maxwell Davies' Taverner in 1972. He was named musical director of the Australian Opera in 1969. In that capacity he conducted the first opera given in the new Sydney Opera House on September 28, 1973—War and Peace. His initial appearance with the Welsh National Opera occurred in 1975. He relinquished the Sydney post in 1976 while continuing with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra until 1983. In 1980 he was appointed principal conductor of the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in Manchester, which was renamed the BBC Philharmonic later that year. When he departed the orchestra in 1991 he was granted the title Conductor Emeritus and received a knighthood in the same year. His work on Russian music produced a completion of Prokofiev's opera Maddalena from the composer's manuscript sketches and the editing and premiere recording of Prokofiev's incidental music to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. He recorded regularly for Chandos. Downes and his wife, a former ballet dancer whom he had married in 1955, died together in Zurich, Switzerland, in July 2009 while she was terminally ill.